


and spring herself when she woke at dawn

by shipyrds



Category: Friends at the Table (Podcast)
Genre: Character Study, M/M, Post-Canon, aubade, i spent too much time reading about mending nets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-18
Updated: 2020-01-18
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:20:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22307065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shipyrds/pseuds/shipyrds
Summary: After the end of the world, Samot washes up on shore, the spring itching in his veins.
Relationships: Samot/Samothes (Friends at the Table), but mostly Gen - Relationship
Comments: 3
Kudos: 8
Collections: Secret Samol 2019





	and spring herself when she woke at dawn

**Author's Note:**

  * For [khachirkhel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/khachirkhel/gifts).



In the end, the first person to find Samot when he washes up on an inlet off Aubade's main harbor isn't Samothes at all. Perhaps the King-God has grown complacent, sure that nothing would breach his wall of starstuff. Perhaps he is less attuned to Samot than he once was. Perhaps he is merely asleep, or deep in his forge, or any number of mundane little things that keep him from noticing the tear in the fabric of his walled garden. 

Whatever the reason, an old fisherman's face greets Samot when he wakes, weathered and sunbrowned. He looks like Samol might have, if Samol's wrinkles had come mostly from the sun, rather than time and illness and fear. 

"Hello, new blood," he says. 

The fisherman's voice is a high, slightly Ordennan rasp, nothing like Samol's, and Samot doesn't know whether to cry with relief or grief. He rolls onto his back and looks up at the blue, blue sky instead. 

An osprey flies overhead, a fat fish clutched in its talons. Samot feels like maybe he's the fish, here. 

The fisherman squats down beside him. "Not very talkative, are you? That's all right. Most people aren't, when they first arrive." He smiles kindly down at Samot, his eyes crinkling almost shut. "It'll get easier."

"I'm not sure it will," Samot says. His voice is a ruin. "I'm not sure I want it to."

The fisherman passes him a hip flask of water and pats him on the shoulder, where his scars are blooming. "That'll get easier, too," he says. "But not if you lay on this beach until you're crisp."

They walk up the beach together. Samot leans heavily on the fisherman, whose name, he learns, is Elias. He’s wiry-strong despite his age, tendons popping from his wrinkled hands as he grips Samot’s shoulder, fingers slotting among the green buds.

Samot repays his kindness by telling Elias he doesn’t have a name. It’s a selfish act, to presume that if he refuses to acknowledge the past it won’t come back to bite him. To pretend he can make amends like this. 

“Well, No-name,” Elias says, “we’ll find you one soon enough.” 

Samot hums noncommittally. He concentrates on the way the sand feels on his bare feet, how his tendons and roots merge, on not falling over. How did humans usually come by names? He knows the disciples of Samothes took new names when they were ordained, but it’s a little late to ask Hadrian why he chose that name, of all the names. Did another prelate suggest it? Had he liked the way it sounded? 

Samot’s never claimed a name for himself, only assembled titles around the one Samol gave him. He finds something pleasingly circular, though, in the thought of taking one last word for himself. 

Elias leads him up to a small house by the docks, nets spread on its roof to dry in the sun. Inside, the kitchen is cool and dark, salt and wood and iron heavy on the air. A vase filled with shells sits on the blue-painted kitchen table, and Samot, filled with some urge he can’t explain, plucks a flower from his arm and nestles it in an obliging whelk. 

“Looks nice,” Elias says. “You hungry?” It’s clearly not a question. Elias is already clattering around the kitchen. 

Samot obligingly devours a mess of pan-fried fish, greens, and rice. Elias fills the silence with idle chatter. He has not commented on the scars that cover Samot’s body, the vines bursting from his skin, and Samot almost wishes he would, just to break the tension. His arms itch. He feels too young, as though next to emerge from his skin will be his old wolf teeth and claws, his body full of mouths. But Elias talks about the weather (fair, with a fine breeze), the catch (good), the difficulties in repairing boats on an island where nothing comes in but what the dead bring with them. 

“Doesn’t Samothes make you what you need?” Samot asks. 

Elias narrows his eyes at him. Samot realizes too late that Elias hasn’t mentioned Samothes yet. “He doesn’t make much we don’t already have. Says it’s better we don’t depend on him.” 

Samot thinks of Samothes’ broad hands spread over plans for the University, of raised voices, of a King-God who rewrote the map of his city as easily as breathing. He finds this vision of a distant observer almost incomprehensible. 

“He made my anchor, though,” Elias says. “Nice work, if a bit fancy. I’ll show it to you later, once you’ve rested up a bit.” 

Samot slips into an exhausted sleep on Elias’s spare bed, wrapped under a carefully stitched quilt. He dreams, unsettled, of an empty kitchen, where he walks in the slow and unsteady manner of dreams to the worn wooden table and the vase where his own odd harvest sits, petals pink and blooming. He reaches out and as his finger touches the flower in its small and futile container, it explodes into a maelstrom of devouring vines, until he and the cottage and the entirety of Samothes’ walled city is subsumed in a flood of ravenous green. 

When he wakes, the flower is unchanged, if a little worse for lack of water. It reminds him of his own thirst. There’s a bucket and dipper in the kitchen, and he drinks deeply. On the table, the flower droops balefully at him. With a sigh, he gives it the last sip from the dipper before he can think better of it. 

Elias is out on the docks with a gaggle of children, ostensibly mending nets but mostly regaling the children with incredibly tall tales. Samot pulls his threadbare shirt around his tattered chest, but the children are too distracted by Elias’s tales to see anything odd about him. When they do notice him, it is more to laugh at his clumsy hands than to notice the greenery that springs from his skin. 

“You’re not very good at this,” says one girl, when he pulls too hard on a knot and the whole section he’d been working comes apart. She takes the needle from him and unravels the tangle he’s made. “You have to knot at each join, see.”

“I’ve never done it before,” he says. The citizens of Marielda hadn’t generally mended their nets, at least not where he could see them. Perhaps Samothes had given them stronger ones. Or maybe they hadn’t fished at all. He can’t believe Elias does this every time he goes fishing. It seems wildly inefficient, to fix something that will only break again and again and again. 

Lemma and the other children don’t seem to mind, though. He supposes he shouldn’t either. 

And so he lets the weeks pass simply. Elias pokes him, if he lies in bed too long, and sends him to Ducarte’s for pastries or salt or a patch for their shutters. He mends nets. Overhand knot, back knot, seize the loose edge and pull it taut, knot, repeat. His mends still aren’t uniform, but at least he’s no longer leaving them worse than when he picked them up.

He carves up the fish Elias brings back, picks bones from flesh and flesh from bones. He walks around the city, makes idle conversation with the citizenry. He avoids questions about himself, or visiting the small library, or looking up at the hill where Samothes’ palace gleams.

He tries not to be ungrateful when Elias’ kindness chafes. Mostly he succeeds. His hair grows down to tickle the back of his neck, and he ruins Elias’ sharpest boning knife hacking it off. 

His scars don’t heal. They ache, sometimes, and the flowers bloom and wilt and go to seed and bloom again, but they never fill in with skin. He has to drink more water, sit out in the sun, or he feels weak, sick with longing for something his blood cannot provide. He does not know what will happen when the winter comes, but he has had worse things under his skin.

Winter does not come. Aubade does not have seasons, caught in a perpetual early-summer pleasantness. Samot finds himself restless, pacing the docks, looking out at the horizon for something to change. Anything. 

Nothing does. A storm hovers in the distance, but it never builds. It never crashes. He is the only shift in this immutable world, the only memory of the cycles of change the one etched into his skin. His flowers grow and fruit and die, but the trees behind Ducarte’s are always at the perfect cusp of their ripeness. They do not even fall and rot, waiting on their heavy branches for someone to pluck them and make them into pies. 

“Something is wrong here,” he says to Elias over dinner. “Don’t you think something’s not right about this?” 

Elias looks at him like he’s grown a second head, or maybe just another garden. “No,” he says. “No, I don’t.” He turns back to the stove, flips the fish in the pan. “I think you want something to be wrong so you can fix it, but that doesn’t mean anything actually is.”

Samot feels an old violence well up in him. He wants to shake the old man loose. “If all I wanted was to fix something, I would just sit and mend your nets for the rest of– however long we have here. You were someone once, a man who grew and changed and learned and forgot. You must have been. Why would you be happy as this– this static caricature of a wise old fisherman now?”

Elias does not look at him. He takes a deep breath, his old shoulders rising and falling, and then he removes the pan from the fire and damps the flames. “You don’t know anything about who I was before, boy. You never asked.” He turns then, and his eyes are sharp and black. Samot remembers Elias’s hands with a boning knife, swift and sure and unhesitating.

“Maybe I was a killer, and then I was killed in turn. Maybe I lived a simple life then and a simple life now. Maybe I asked for none of this until a sword brought me to my end and then I found it wasn’t an end.” He stabs a finger at Samot.

“You don’t know, though. You haven’t earned that. So how dare you stand here in the afterlife I built for myself and condescend to me?” 

Samot feels his temper flare, reaches down for his power, for the unmaking and remaking of the world. But where he expects to find Nothing, he finds nothing instead, only an echoing emptiness, like a bucket scraped against the bottom of a well. 

“Get out,” Elias says. And Samot, the Knower of Things, His Most Honourable Contradiction, the Unbroken Lord, turns on his heel and leaves, a pit festering full in the sour of his stomach.

It’s cold on the docks. The wind comes in from the sea at night, and Samot had left without his cloak. He pulls his knees to his chest and looks out at the lightning in the distance, dancing against the waves. Too far away for thunder. Above him, the sky is empty, not even an unmoving star hovering there to taunt him. 

The flowers on his arms bend and bow with the breeze, edges caught in the light of the full moon. He wishes he had a net to mend, or tear apart. Something to do with his hands to keep them from turning into claws. He picks at a loose splinter on the docks instead. 

Is this the rest of his life, then? An apology to Elias, and then some slick of domesticity laid over top a placid, gentle, interminable misery? He, the maker and unmaker of worlds, the last wolf alive, piddling away his days in some fisherman’s hut and hoping to be forgotten? 

He hears a heavy footstep on the dock and turns, expecting Elias, or perhaps another of the fishermen sent to haul him back for an apology. But it’s Samothes, broader, softer, older. He looks comfortable, in his open belted tunic and loose white pants. Despite the chill, he looks like he belongs here. 

Samot realizes his hands are shaking, and he fists them in his pants. He does not get up. He holds his breath, unable to speak as Samothes sits next to him instead. 

“I didn’t think I would ever see you again,” Samothes says. The moonlight curves over his face, the crags of his brows and nose and jaw. He leans back on his hands. Samot would think him the picture of leisure if he had not known him for a thousand thousand years, if he didn’t notice the barely suppressed tension in his arms and back.

He swallows. “I’m here,” he says, an obvious statement in lieu of anything better. 

Samothes turns to him, reaches out to clasp his hand and pull him into an embrace. And Samot goes to him, lets himself be held. Samothes’ hands are careful with the blooms on his arms, trembling as he runs his hand over a petal.

Samot is used to being the overwhelming storm, the one who sweeps his staid husband up in a tide of emotion, or passion, or both. But, he thinks, as Samothes’ arms shake around him, he has always underestimated Samothes at his peril. 

“What happened?” Samothes asks.

Samot does not know which question he is asking– what happened to him, what happened to Hieron, what happened to them. He pulls back, clasping Samothes’ arms. A vine trails up towards his broad shoulder. He looks at his husband, his enemy, the god he killed, the man he loved, the king he dethroned. He looks at the lines that have gentled his fierce brows, the streaks of gray at his temples. “I didn’t think I could have what I wanted,” he says, finally. “I didn’t think I should.” 

Samothes pulls him back in. They do not speak, although Samot knows they have much to say, a past full of echoing rooms to fill with conversation. In the distance, he can hear thunder on the wind. A summer rain is coming. He breathes it in, fills his lungs with the promise of water, feels the spring itch under his skin.

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Secret Samol, waveechocave! One of your prompts was for Samsam, and I couldn't resist. I hope you enjoy!
> 
> Title from Sara Teasdale's lovely ["There Will Come Soft Rains,"](https://poets.org/poem/there-will-come-soft-rains) which is a really exquisite (and prescient) poem about the aftermath of war.
> 
> Also, if you want a fisherman to tell you how to mend nets in a very strong Hoi Toider accent, you can do that [here.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bw4_iwRKFXA)


End file.
